WIP

Yes, lemmings never seem to be able to see when they are approaching the edge of a cliff either.

I'm thinking it was most likely James Lovelock, who is most known for the Gaia Hypothesis, which he created to explain how life has modified the planet, and how natural feedback from living organisms could balance the extreme variations that would occur without the presence of life. Unfortunately, the new age crowd took his metaphor to 'think of the Earth as a living organism' as literal truth and started worshipping a mother goddess that will protect the planet. He's over 90 years old now, and still apparently in excellent health, as he is still writing, doing interviews and public lectures. Unfortunately, he has had to spend most of the last 30 years trying to correct all of the misconceptions generated by Gaia. He did not intend it to mean that the Earth was conscious or alive, nor did he intend it to mean that Mother Nature will just fix all of the crap that we subject the environment to. He has become darkly pessimistic about the future of the human race in recent years, because of the combined effects of overpopulation (Earth currently supports three times the number of people that can be sustained permanently), and rapidly rising greenhouse gas levels. He was the first to predict that we will reach a tipping point where stopping global warming will become impossible because of methane released in Arctic permafrost, and CO2 absorption stopping and possibly reversing in the world's oceans. And all of this goes on without any serious collective attempts to halt the march to extinction. Lovelock sees catastrophic climate change and mass population extinctions as inevitable by the end of this century, and the remaining issue will be whether we will do enough to stop complete disaster and future extinction of the human race entirely.....and I have to say, I am stuck having to agree with him on almost everything so far.

No one said censorship...the call is for those with microphones to use them in a responsible manner. And the debate over civility on the air avoids the most crucial issue -- concentration of ownership of the media by a small number of corporations.

I remember at the time, seeing him on TV explain how he got his inspiration while wandering around an electronics and appliances store and eavesdropping on the conversation of the guys in the shipping and receiving dept.. But, as they say "the road to hell is paved with good intentions!" I'll leave it for someone else to debate whether "faggot" is serious enough to call for a ban....it doesn't seem to be that big of deal to me.....but I'm getting old and behind the times, maybe things have changed. On the other hand, Eminem and Kanye West seem to be trying to present their latest deplorable videos as public service, but they should be banned as well, whether or not they believe their own bullshit stories.

I'm not a gun owner, and haven't ventured enough into the Gun Registry issue to start posting comments on it. What I'm concerned with is the nightmare across the border that's been created by a rich and powerful Gun Lobby, and their expertise at lobbying (which became the template for lobbyists ever since) because most of the gun crimes that are committed in Canada are not with rifles or legally owned handguns -- they're coming from the wave of U.S. purchased guns that are smuggled into this country. If we could get together with the Mexican President (who has raised this issue), I'd be happy to see this one dealt with.

The problem is that after you get past not believing in God, it's difficult to find common ground. Even secular humanist organizations like C.F.I. - which have a set of philosophical principles as a base, still can have widely divergent views on how to deal with believers, how society and government should be run....everything from socialists to anarcho-capitalists. One guy I used to converse with at meetups was a young engineer who happened to be a huge fan of Frederich Nietzsche....and refreshing my memory by going over Nietzsche's ideas, I found that I am even more averse to his take on the world than I was when I read about him 30 years earlier. When it comes to religious institutions; they can be caught up in controversies that split them apart, but for the most part, they have generally accepted dogma and doctrines that provide some unity to keep the group together.

Maybe you should keep a few more things private, especially since boasting about your sexual prowess has nothing to do with the thread topic! FYI, most women aren't impressed by guys claiming they are better than the men they have in their lives. You are venturing into stalker territory with this kind of talk. If I recall, you are offended by a response she made to you that quoted your feeble attempt to offend atheists. Why not go to the places that encourage internet dating and hookups, since this is supposed to be a discussion forum about issues. I'd rather see more women participating on this board, which sometimes looks like a sausage fest; but showing some respect for women....specifically dealing with their comments, rather than the fact that they are women, might be a good first step.

Wow! I've heard this before, and I'm still amazed that anyone actually believes Foxnews and right wing radio's reinvention of history. This didn't happen 20 or 50 years ago! This should still be part of the public record....but the right is already creating a myth of what has happened last year and the year before. Do you really consider Lawrence Summers, Tim Geitner, or Rahm Emmanuel socialists? If they qualify as socialists, I'm so far off to your left now that you probably wouldn't be able to see me! And c'mon Czars....as if Bush and previous presidents back to Nixon didn't have their own czars. If I recall correctly, Nixon started this special position when he created the Drug Czar when the War On Drugs first began. And any czars that Obama had who were caught in a whiff of controversy, were tossed overboard before they had a chance to select new office furniture. To be honest, I don't see what these tea party activists are complaining about (except for the obvious one - he's black!). President Obama has been a colossal disappointment to real liberals and progressives in America, who were hoping that he would actually close Gunatanamo and end the wars (since he used his state senate opposition to the Iraq War as a wedge issue against Hillary); or that he was really serious about healthcare reform. The results have been a military and foreign policy that is virtually identical to Bush. We have learned from Wikileaks that America under Obama, is still undermining non-compliant democratic governments (Honduras) with military coups. Obama has had I.C.E. agents forcibly deport more illegals to Mexico than Bush; he has expanded policies that violate international law (like declaring it legal to assassinate U.S. citizens living in foreign countries); and his administration shutting down whistleblowers at all levels of government, especially defense......so what has the right wing got to complain about?....besides that he's black? America's two party democracy is for the most part, a dog and pony show that churns over unimportant issues as the most important government policies remain the same from one administration to the next.....whether it's Democrat or Republican! A government takeover of corporations and Wall Street....what a laugh! GM is back under private ownership, and they have successfully busted their workers down to a level where employees with less than 10 years seniority are working for half of the wages as guaranteed in earlier contracts......thank you President Obama! If you take a look at the electoral map of the recent Congressional Elections, you'll notice that Democrats got hammered in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana....districts that have GM factories. And I haven't seen any mention on the MSM of the fact that these blue collar districts weren't in a mood to reward President Obama for putting them back on the line for $14.00 an hour. There's a lesson there that is lost on the MSM talking heads who kept repeating the mantra that "Obama needs to move to the middle," as if he hadn't betrayed his voting base quite enough! No point watching them anyway, they are either clueless or malicious....and I don't care which. And Wall Street....give me a break! Wall Street owns the Whitehouse, no matter which party wins the election! Get it straight who owns who.

I guess you are rarely disappointed, since you set such a low bar for lawful and civil conduct.

Did I miss something! Was a Republican shot by a gunman? No; seems odd that if he was just an apolitical crazy as the right is desperately trying to spin lately, that he would target one of the few Democratic House Members in his state. One that had received previous death threats, along with vandalism of her office, just like the other Democrat from Arizona - Raul Grijalva. There have been other killers who have been inspired by the big right wing media loons; so I don't really give a shit if there is a trail of breadcrumbs leading from one of them to this new mass murderer; Sheriff Dupnik's condemnation of them for the way they have poisoned the public discourse, is still justified. Sheriff Dupnik certainly doesn't owe Limbaugh, Beck, or O'Reilly any apologies!

We are just lucky that Medicare got started in Canada during that lull between the end of WWII and 1980, when the middle class was growing in size and income levels, and corporate control of society had receded somewhat. We would never have got it off the ground in the present environment, and I don't see how America can get anything more than the near-worthless compromise they are calling "health care reform." No reforms are possible under the current situation, that are not tacitly supported by the health, drug and private hospital corporations.

Okay Hardner, since you started this thread for the apparent purpose of informing us that the importance of new media (internet) means we don't have to concern ourselves with the corporate concentration of ownership of newspapers and broadcasting, what the hell happens as soon as net neutrality falls?....which it will in the coming years. Those of us who have gone outside of print and broadcast media to find the unvarnished information are going to find these sites failing to download webpages and video links as the bandwidth gets hogged by the big infotainment conglomerates. And, as a sidepoint; you invoked the name of Noam Chomsky in your opening post; now doesn't the fact that someone with this level of intellectual heft has been frozen out of the MSM in the United States because of his harsh criticism of NAFTA, Israel's Occupation of Palestine, and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, tell you something about how free and open print and broadcasting really is? Aside from internet programs, the only place where you'll find him interviewed in the last few years is on CBC Radio, and other foreign public broadcasting channels.

Earth’s CO2 concentration is rapidly rising to a level not seen in ∼30 to 100 million years, and Earth’s climate was extremely warm at these levels of CO2. If the world reaches such concentrations of atmospheric CO2, positive feedback processes can amplify global warming beyond current modeling estimates. The human species and global ecosystems will be placed in a climate state never before experienced in their evolutionary history and at an unprecedented rate. Note that these conclusions arise from observations from Earth’s past and not specifically from climate models. Will we, as a species, listen to these messages from the past in order to avoid repeating history? http://climateprogress.org/2011/01/13/science-kiehl-ncar-paleoclimate-lessons-from-earths-hot-past/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+climateprogress%2FlCrX+%28Climate+Progress%29 Ever since reading Under A Green Sky two years ago by paleontologist Peter Ward, I've come to the conclusion that we can have a better grasp of future climatic change by examining past examples of when Co2 levels went up 2 to 3 times present levels and caused mass extinctions, than we can get from climate models predicting future changes. And Joe Romm's Climate Progress has a disturbing examination of recent published studies in Science, Nature, and from NASA's Goddard Institute, which includes a number of studies detailing how melting of Arctic permafrost accelerated and amplified positive feedbacks in the past, and what they can tell us about our near future: The disinformers claim that projections of dangerous future warming from greenhouse gas emissions are based on computer models. In fact, ClimateProgress readers know that the paleoclimate data is considerably more worrisome than the models (see Hansen: ‘Long-term’ climate sensitivity of 6°C for doubled CO2). That’s mainly because the vast majority of the models largely ignore key amplifying carbon-cycle feedbacks, such as the methane emissions from melting tundra (see Are Scientists Underestimating Climate Change). ...........The NCAR release is here: “Earth’s hot past could be prologue to future climate.” The study begins by noting: Climate models are invaluable tools for understanding Earth’s climate system. But examination of the real world also provides insights into the role of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide) in determining Earth’s climate. Not only can much be learned by looking at the observational evidence from Earth’s past, but such know ledge can provide context for future climate change. ...........Indeed, in the release, Kiehl notes his study “found that carbon dioxide may have at least twice the effect on global temperatures than currently projected by computer models of global climate.” Why is the ‘real world’ warming so much greater than the models? The vast majority of the models focus on the equilibrium climate sensitivity — typically estimated at about 3°C for double CO2 (equivalent to about ¾°C per W/m2) — only includes fast feedbacks, such as water vapor and sea ice. As Hansen has explained in deriving his 6°C ‘long-term’ sensitivity: ...........NSF issues world a wake-up call: “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.” Methane release from the not-so-perma-frost is the most dangerous amplifying feedback in the entire carbon cycle. The permafrost permamelt contains a staggering “1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere,” much of which would be released as methane. Methane is is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times as potent over 20 years! The carbon is locked in a freezer in the part of the planet warming up the fastest (see “Tundra 4: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss“). Half the land-based permafrost would vanish by mid-century on our current emissions path (see “Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return” and below). No climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra. ...........In the longer term, past 2100, if we were to get anywhere near the kind of warming that Kiehl’s analysis of the paleoclimate data suggests we are headed to, that could render large tracts of the planet uninhabitable. That was the conclusion of a recent PNAS paper coauthored by Matthew Huber, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue (release here). http://climateprogress.org/2011/01/13/science-kiehl-ncar-paleoclimate-lessons-from-earths-hot-past/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+climateprogress%2FlCrX+%28Climate+Progress%29

Try to connect the dots! The leaks dump cold water on carbon sequestration schemes.

There doesn't have to be. The themes that are hammered on day after day on the radio provide the ideological underpinnings for the conspiracy theorists that he was getting his crazy ideas about government. .. Too rational? Like Glenn Beck or Michael Savage. .. Nice try! But until net neutrality is gobbled up by the same media conglomerates that own TV and radio, the web is the media that has any semblance of democracy. If you want to watch crazy rightwing crackpots like Alex Jones or David Duke, they have their own channels. When it comes to radio, the owners of the stations have full control over what kind of content they will allow on them -- and the concentration of ownership that's allowed a few media conglomerates to bombard us with their messages, should be the real issue.

Mark Knopfler likes to throw different styles of music together on the same album, but I was sick of Money For Nothing after the 2nd or 3rd play. The problem with banning it from historical fiction like The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, is that it raises the question of whether the book itself has enough merit to be used to teach children today. In its time, the book could be considered as a condemnation of racism; but it is patronizing in its portrayal of Jim, who is portrayed as a gullible simpleton. So, why make the issue about excising words from the book? As for what words are, or are not offensive -- I'll leave that for others to argue about. I'm not going to bother using words that are offensive, but if there is a real constituency offended by certain words like "faggot" in this case, there should be more signs of opposition than one phone call complaining about it. This could just be a crank who's got nothing better to do with his time.

In a way, I would have been happy if they had banned this song from the airwaves 25 years ago, when it was being played every 15 minutes. I got my first CD player when the album "Brothers In Arms" was released, and I would skip Money For Nothing every time it came up to play. The song was a bad fit on the rest of the album, and seemed like a cloying attempt to create a hit by a band which was critically acclaimed, but could never sell big numbers previously.

Sometimes he leaves the reservation, like he did when he went hard against the Bush Administration over the Iraq War and became the main hub of the 9-11 truther movement. But Jones's anti-government anarchism plays to a rightwing crowd. Since conservatives and libertarians identify government as the source of most problems, whereas liberals and leftists want to improve government services and use government to balance the gaps between rich and poor, most of what Alex Jones says is music to the ears of the rightwing.....except when he goes into looney conspiracy theory land.

There have been other shootings, murders, and violent attacks that have been politically motivated. They deserve some attention also. After the murder of Dr. George Tiller a couple of years ago, I noticed that some pro-choice advocates say that the occasional murders of doctors and staff members at abortion clinics seemed to take on the character of exclamation points to reinforce the thousands of death threats and acts of vandalism that they have to put up with. By hyping the hysteria, the anti-abortion groups are able to create a climate where the occasional nutcase will grab his gun and take action. And in those cases, Operation Rescue and similar groups will wash their hands of the assailant and say they do not advocate violence. I see a similar theme operating in the background, where rightwing movements use intimidation tactics to get their way, and have occasional violent acts to keep liberals in a state of fear.

Irrelevant....the right has been gleaning the web to find anything and everything that liberals, moderates or leftists have said that can be considered dangerous. The mountain of quotes coming from the right looks like an avalanche in comparison; and that's what really pissed me off when network newsreaders on CNN and elsewhere immediately went into false equivalency mode, after Sheriff Dupnick condemned the violent rhetoric that has poisoned most debates in Arizona.

He's pretty off the wall, but most of his conspiracies are right wing anarchist material that are regular features on the Alex Jones Show, and similar places. There is a lot more civility here than most discussion forums these days.

Which your link identifies was said at a fundraiser, not during a public campaign speech. 'Don't bring a knife to a gunfight' is an old expression that's been around longer than I have. Now does that expression, which can be interpreted into many different contexts compare with "The tree of Liberty needs to be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants," attributed to Thomas Jefferson....someone the teaparty nevers go to for quotes when it comes to concepts like church/state separation for example. Jefferson considered the new republic to be a test project, and not something destined and consecrated by God, as Glenn Beck and present day teapartiers seem to think. Jefferson was a revolutionary, and was not averse to another violent revolution if the democratic experiment didn't work right. Are today's tea party activists considering themselves to be revolutionaries? If so, can they be charged with sedition and treason?

And this is where it begins and ends for you in the climate change debate! Climate change denial seems to come from one of two sources: 1. The economic interests of oil, gas and coal. Besides the billionaires who run these corporations, many people working in these industries are focused on preserving their source of income. 2. Fear of world government. If it's not about the money, the other block comes from the threat that enforcing CO2 reductions cannot be done without a global authority that has enough leverage to make noncompliance a worse option. And, if I have to pick between world government, and possible extinction by the end of this century, I'll choose the latter.

Since you are always pulling the story about the cooling between 1940 and 1970 as evidence for natural climate cycles, you need to be aware of something that your global warming-denial sources won't inform you about: particulate air pollution that increased during the economic boom after WWII, lowered the albedo of the Earth's atmosphere. Despite the rising CO2 levels, air pollution was slowing down the warming effects of increasing greenhouse gas levels. And guess what happened after an intensive program to clean up the cities and cut auto exhausts and industrial air pollution? More sunlight is getting through to warm the planet. Kind of ironic, but it sinks arguments put forth that we need to fight pollution first, before worrying about climate change. Pollution is not as big a problem as dealing with AGW; and that means dealing with all of the negative effects on increasing CO2 levels, since, if we just try to darken the sky to stop the warming, we still have the problem of rising CO2 being absorbed by the world's oceans and raising the process of ocean acidification.

Well, you got one thing right for a change! The right wing extremists and gun nuts deserve no apologies, and shall receive none here. Spineless leftists, and so called moderates are free to speak for themselves however. Does Jesse Kelly, the Republican gun nut, and rival to Gabrielle Giffords deserve an apology? No, he still needs to explain why he would host a campaign event that invited attendees to shoot at a target with a picture of Rep. Giffords on it. Does Sarah Palin deserve an apology, after spouting stupid statements like "don't retreat, instead reload," and posting gunsight targets on her campaign website deserve an apology? No. After all of the stupid things she's said since she became a national celebrity, this stupid, selfish bitch may have played the victim card at the wrong time by going on the attack using "blood libel" as an analogy for her persecution. No doubt she'll be firing whoever wrote her latest speech, now that most of her loyal pentecostal voting base seems to be moving more and more to Huckabee. Does Glenn Beck, who's said so many stupid things - too numerous itemize, deserve an apology? No. And in Beck's case, his idiocy can be connected to a highway cop-killer, named Byron Williams, who was apparently inspired by Beck's "expose" of the Tides Foundation, and was on his way to shoot up their HQ, and then on to the headquarters of the ACLU. He already has blood on his hands, just like FN leader Bill O'Reilly, for fomenting the eventual murder of Dr. George Tiller, with his "Tiller the baby killer" rants. Jared Loughner's favourite books and obscure rightwing influences are mostly from the right wing, and the violent rhetoric and extreme lunatic gun rights advocacy is an exclusive right wing domain. The right is trying to blur the lines of distinction between angry rhetoric and violent rhetoric, because they are incubating a fascist movement inside the broader conservative/libertarian base, and refuse for whatever reasons to criticize or remove their extremists. Instead, they try to co-opt them in support of their business agenda. So, who influenced Jared Loughner? From his own writings, his rambling attacks follow common themes of the far right: Most wind up concluding that Loughner suffered from mental problems. But experts said that several oft-repeated phrases and concepts — his fixation on grammar conspiracies, currency and the "second United States Constitution" — seem derived from concepts explored with regularity among elements of the far right. "What you can see across the board in his writings is the idea that you can't trust the government — that the government engages in mind control against its citizens," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has long monitored the radical right. Loughner's assertion that he would not "pay debt with a currency that's not backed by gold and silver" is a running theme among right-wing opponents of the Federal Reserve system. "The people who talk about the manipulation of currency follow it backward from the IRS to the Federal Reserve … that it's run by either secret, powerful elites or secret, powerful Jewish elites," said Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a nonprofit group that also monitors right-wing extremism. Berlet wrote an article this week noting that similarly disjointed talk of government currency and money manipulation plots was found in the case of antiabortionist John C. Salvi III, convicted in the 1994 clinic shootings in Massachusetts that left two women dead and several people injured. Potok said it appeared that Loughner's frequent references to government control of the public through grammar ("The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar," Loughner said in one video) were drawn from David Wynn Miller, a far-right activist in Milwaukee. Miller has argued to a small but avid following that the government launched a control program by writing citizens' names in capital letters on their birth certificates, and that if colons and hyphens are added to people's names in a certain way, they become a "prepositional phrase" no longer subject to taxation. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/12/nation/la-na-arizona-shooting-extremism-20110112 And, where would Loughner have gotten the idea that if you're mad, you can just go in and shoot up the place? TPM has a page of links that look like a laundry list of calls to take violent action right from Republican candidates + one Bluedog Democrat: Before Shooting, A Campaign Season Rife With Gun Rhetoric